Fifty-seven days into the Trump administration, here's something you know to be true: Your job is better than Sean Spicer's. Any job. You would not want to be the White House press secretary.

Trying to sell any president's message to a dubious White House press corps has got to be less fun than, say, tossing garbage for the Sanitation Department. Add to that this particular president's rather routine departures from verifiable facts, especially via Twitter, leaving to Spicer the task of trying to convince about half of America that Donald Trump does, in fact, have a grip on reality. It's a tough sell.

This, however, is what I like about Sean Spicer (or Melissa, as he is sometimes known): He shows up for work every day, and he talks to reporters.

You may consider that the basic hack minimum for a press secretary, but I'm here to tell you that too many people in government seem to have lost their voices. If they take questions at all, they want them only in writing, as though email is the fundamental form of human communication, rather than voice. Then their responses, too, come in writing, if ever responses there may be.

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Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Share your thoughts at http://blog.timesunion.com/editors.

Today marks the end of Sunshine Week, an annual effort to remind citizens of the importance of open government. Through news articles and editorials over the past days, this newspaper and hundreds of others have underscored the fact that American democracy is imperiled if its citizens don't have access to information about what government is doing.

It's a common sense notion: We ought to be able to easily find out what the officials we hire with our votes — and the workers who are delegated the tasks of government by those we elect — are doing, and how they are spending our tax dollars.

But it's not that easy. Too many people in public roles are reluctant to let citizens see what's going on behind their office doors or what's hidden in their files. Citizens would be closed out entirely, I think, if we didn't have sunshine laws — including New York's Freedom of Information Law, which requires the release of most documents, and the Open Meetings Law, which limits what public work can be done in private.

What's most noticeable in recent years has been a growing reluctance among public officials, and even their "public information officers," to speak directly with citizens and with the reporters who are trying to keep those citizens informed.

You sense the frustration of veteran reporters whose legitimate questions hit a hard wall of no comment. NBC's Andrea Mitchell, for instance, got so frustrated by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's portrayal of a sphinx that she twice used photo sessions this month to ask questions. Tillerson pretended not to hear. His aides scolded her.

The same sort of disappearing act is prevalent among top state officials in New York. During the administration of the first governor named Cuomo, it wasn't unusual for a reporter to be able to talk with an agency commissioner or to drop by the offices of top aides to the governor. Now such people won't allow any unscripted questioning; often, their designated press officers aren't allowed to talk, either.

Instead, reporters are usually instructed to submit written questions. Answers are then typically formulated in consultation with the governor's press office —not that any agency head wouldn't naturally agree with the governor, of course — and a response is sent by email.

Perhaps this is a function of the whole society's excessive use of screens — laptops and cellphones and tablets. It's changing the way people interact, and not for the good: A 2015 Harvard Business Review article reported on research suggesting that over-reliance on screens as a replacement for in-person interactions "can create distorted perceptions about other people's values and beliefs." The study's author, Stony Brook University professor Karen Sobel-Lojeski, found that unwanted effects could include sharp declines in trust, cooperative behavior, innovation and project success.

No less is at risk, she wrote, than an understanding of "mutually shared humanity" if we fail to reduce what she describes as "virtual distance" caused by the dominance of keyboard tapping over — can we say it? — talking.

In the pre-email era, I spent a few years as a politician's press secretary. Any reporter who contacted our office got a call back within a half hour. That dependability made it more likely, I figured, that the reporter would turn to me for information in the future. Of course, that trusting relationship would have been ruined if what I said to the reporter wasn't true.

Nobody ever asked me to lie to the media. My job, I'm sure, was never as tough as Sean Spicer's.